


stars in your eyes

by miraphora



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drug Use, F/M, Glitterstim/Spice, Mission Fic, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, bras in space, extremely one-time drug use, that tag is for carrie, this was gonna be some silly crackfic and it got like super srs out of nowhere, vague post-scarif setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-10-24 03:56:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10733634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraphora/pseuds/miraphora
Summary: “You’re late,” he said flatly, as her boots echoed clankily on the durasteel planking of the corridor connecting the small cargo hold and cockpit.





	1. Chapter 1

Cassian was sitting in the cockpit imagining the various ways in which he might find Jyn Erso’s broken body if he had to venture out to retrieve her when the hatch sensor finally pinged his attention. He stifled a sigh, tilting his head back to check the chrono on the overhead console, as if he hadn’t checked it precisely 6 microseconds ago, then 30 seconds ago, and then three minutes before that, and--

“You’re late,” he said flatly, as her boots echoed clankily on the durasteel planking of the corridor connecting the small cargo hold and cockpit. 

There was a tripping interruption to her steps and a sudden snorting laugh, which dissolved into a humming giggle. A frisson of unease shivered down Cassian’s spine and he swiveled the pilot’s chair, his hand carefully gripping the holdout blaster strapped under the forward console. The humming leveled out, and broadened into a very loose “ _bailemos ay!_ ” and he watched with his breath squeezing in his lungs as she spun in her combat boots, fingertips outstretched and dragging along the bulkhead panels. 

He stood cautiously, taking a step towards her. “Jyn. What are you--” 

Again that laugh, a sound he’d never heard before. It was higher that he would have thought, not that he’d ever thought about what Jyn Erso’s laughter might sound like. She emerged from the dim of the corridor and stopped in the middle of the doorway of the cockpit, canting her hips and stretching up to grip the rim of the upper bulkhead at either side with sure, callused fingers. His eyes got distracted, following the line of her arms from where her wrists emerged from the edge of her fingerless gloves, to the old vibroblade scar that stood out ragged-edged white on cream in the inner side of her left elbow--normally her arms were covered in layers of thermal shirts and voluminous scarves and--

His throat went dry. “Where is your shirt?” he bit out, tension singing through him. 

Her scarf was slung around her hips, and the pale scarred skin of her upper body was exposed from below the shallow divot of her navel up to the lower band, slightly salt-stained and damp, of her...bra. It was combat issue, plain black, and covered her to a few centimeters below the notch of her clavicles, but it still exposed far more of her skin than he’d ever seen before.

Her hair hung in a ragged fringe in her face, which was flushed. Her full lips quirked, the humming cut short by her pursing mouth. 

“I had to ditch it. The mark went into a club. I was a trifle overdressed.” Her head tilted back a bit and her eyes glinted up at him. “Were you worried, Captain?”

His lips pulled down at the corners sternly, and he stepped nearer, inspecting her eyes with misgiving. Her pupils were huge and swimming with stars. He reached out, grasped her wrists lightly in his, turning her arms this way and that as he smoothed his hands down toward her elbows, searching with sight and touch for any broken skin. 

“You’ve been dosed with something,” he muttered darkly, even as his hands found no evidence of punctures. His eyes darted back over her shoulder toward the closed hatch, his hackles rising. “Were you followed?” 

She didn’t answer, her smile hazy and fuller than the usual wry sidelong stretch. She was looking up into his face still, and he had no idea what she was thinking, but he didn’t think it was good for him, whatever it was. If she was thinking at all.

He shook her a bit, thumbs biting in at the tender crook of her elbows. “Jyn! Were you followed?!” he barked it harshly, losing patience because of his discomfort. 

“I was just thinking how pretty your eyes are,” she replied nonsensically, as if continuing a different conversation entirely. 

He went still, then dropped her arms and grabbed her chin, gentling his touch at the last moment. The most startling thing was that she let him. He had no illusions about her ability to break him into little pieces if she needed to defend herself. 

The smile was still lingering on her lips, and her pupils were only growing. There was the thinnest ring of stormy bluegreen around them. 

“What did you put in your mouth?” His exhale was harsh and he could feel his heart hammering. It could have been poison, but he had a much worse feeling.

“None of the things I’d really like to,” she shot back, her usual impertinence amplified by whatever was in her bloodstream. “Obviously,” she added, with a glance that flicked down his body.

He swallowed hard, the pad of his thumb unconsciously stroking her lower lip, pulling it down. “Open your mouth,” he muttered, voice low and gravelled.

“Here?” she asked, the deep wells of blackness in her eyes flickering with buried sparks. There was a thread of teasing in her voice that was going to make him lose his mind, and he couldn’t afford this. He couldn’t afford this aching weakness when they might be in danger. 

He shot her a dark, quelling glance, and she subsided with a smirk, parting her lips under his urging. The cabin lights in the cockpit were dim and not conducive to an impromptu cavity search, but he could see the dark sparkle caught on her tongue, and in the crease of her molars. Spice. The lines around his mouth creased even deeper, his suspicions confirmed, strangely disappointed.

He dragged his thumb away, and bit off a curse when she closed her mouth around the tip, licking it slowly with her heated tongue. 

“Don’t.”

Her eyes were hard to read, spiced and sparkling as they were. The lines around them deepened though, and her mouth twisted curiously. There was hurt there. She let him pull away, licking her lips carefully. 

“Why are you so afraid of getting what you want?”

His lips thinned and he took a step back, then another, putting physical distance between them, to compensate for the mental distance she was unconsciously eroding. “Don’t do this, Jyn. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think I know what I can feel.” How could she be so infuriatingly matter-of-fact even spiced out of her mind?

He looked grimmer, if that was possible. “You’re just talking out of your head now. Spice does this. Do you know what you took? Was it in a capsule?”

She shrugged, anchoring her hands back on the bulkhead of the door, swaying her hips. There was something heart-wrenchingly childish about her posture. Her eyes lowered, bangs hanging in her face. “It wasn’t much. Just a few threads. You didn’t tell me he was a glit-biter. I had to get close.”

His shoulders tensed defensively. “If I had *known* I wouldn’t have--”

She heaved a sigh, sounding exasperated and put-upon in a way that reminded him suddenly and achingly of Kaytoo. She dropped a hand from the bulkhead, fished around in the pocket of her fatigues, extracting a cipher and a datapad. She held it out to him in an imperious hand, peeking up through the fringe of her bangs at him. 

“Here. Mission accomplished.”

He eyed her hand and the items in it like a dreamvenom snake. Her lips compressed and she grabbed his hand and put the pad and cold metal cylinder into it, then stepped back from him. 

“I wasn’t followed, but we should still get out of here.” She studied him with those eerie blacked eyes, then shook her head. “I’ll be back in the hold. I can’t stand the acrobatics you’re doing right now.” She turned on her heel, shimmying her scarf adroitly back up her body as she stalked away, so that it hung around her neck again. 

Cassian watched her go, his breath escaping him in a shaky exhale. One of the first series of mission alarms he’d set was going off on the chrono, and he knew they had run down their viewport to make it out of this spaceport before the light freighter drew the wrong kind of attention. It would be an hour or two before her high wore off, depending on what “a few threads” meant. Until that happened, he couldn’t be near her. 

He couldn’t look into those starfield eyes and know she could see all the darkness in his head.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This conversation felt like the terminus of an arc that had begun after Eadu, maybe earlier, and her words had the weight of a decision.

He gave it three hours. It wasn’t enough, a lifetime probably wasn’t enough to cure the disorder she inflicted on his tidy internal universe, but it was enough for the spice euphoria...and other effects...to have dissipated. 

He dropped them into another leg of their hyperspace journey, made sure he’d be able to hear the proximity alarm from the hold. Hesitated in the door of the cockpit, then rummaged behind a storage panel for a thermal blanket. He didn’t have spare clothes--he hadn’t expected to need them.

The hold was quiet, but he could hear her soft breathing. He couldn’t see her, though, because she was buried in a corner under a nest of a canvas tarp. His lips twitched, turning up the slightest bit in an unconscious smile. She had to be cold.

“Jyn.”

The rhythm of her breathing didn’t change. He tried again, stepping closer, the blanket tucked under his arm. “Jyn. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she finally muttered, her head emerging from under the canvas. “Better if you’d just let me sleep.” It was a lie. The cadence of her breathing hadn’t changed. She had only been trying to decide whether to respond.

“You must be cold.”

“I’ve slept in worse circumstances,” she replied evenly. 

Silence stretched between them. He had meant to bring her the blanket and return to the cockpit, but she was like a small moon, pulling him into her orbit. He didn’t know how to deal with the sharp edges of their earlier encounter. 

Her eyes flicked over him assessingly, without the suggestive heat they’d had earlier. “Your back is hurting you again.”

“Stop that,” he snapped, without intending to. He’d never had raw edges like this before he met her.

She heaved a sigh and emerged fully from beneath the canvas with an exasperated expression. “I don't need spice to know you're sore. You stand differently.” 

He stared her down, examining the color and dilation of her eyes warily before looking away. He wasn’t sure it was necessarily a good sign that the effects of the spice had faded. “...I fell asleep in the cockpit,” he admitted with chagrin. 

Her brows rose. “In that awful chair? No wonder your spine is giving you fits. Come here.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and turned away, deeply regretting the impulse that had brought him back here. He should have given it more time. The ship was small but he might have avoided her until their return to Hoth. “I don't think that's a good idea.”

“I'm sober and you're being stubborn, Cassian. Come here.”

When he glanced back she was sitting up, knees drawn up and forearms draped over them, hands hanging casually between. Her brows were quirked challengingly. She patted the canvas in front of her. 

He didn’t doubt that she’d follow him back to the cockpit if he left and refused to cooperate.

He tried not to wince as he lowered himself to the deck. Before Scarif, he’d never been wounded this heavily. He was the sort who kept to the shadows, and at a prudent distance. Jyn was the one who had to be right in the thick of things. 

She didn’t wait long enough to touch him that he had time to regret sitting down. He bided his silence, trying not to think of anything at all, and only having marginally more success than he had had earlier, with her spice-spangled eyes picking out every one of his secrets. Her hands stroked in broad swaths over his back, smoothing the wrinkled fabric, and spreading warmth. She had to be cold from the chill of deep space travel, but where she touched him there was only warmth, like the blood in his capillaries wanted to be nearer to her. He let a slow, meditative breath escape, lulled in a way that he knew was foolish.

It felt good to be touched, but he didn’t deserve it, couldn’t afford it. There was a cost to this kind of feeling. He didn’t think he’d ever had the sort of creds to cover this.

He hissed as Jyn pressed the balls of her thumbs along the columns of muscle to either side of his spine then pushed them downward, chasing the twitching ache down and out along his hips. She didn’t apologize--the nerves were tender and the muscle prone to inflammation since his injuries on Scarif. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, except periodic bacta immersion and exercise, and Jyn didn’t make a habit of apologizing for things she had no control over.

The medical droids frequently suggested massage, but Cassian didn’t like the vulnerability of the therapy. He wasn’t accustomed to strange hands on him, and he didn’t like the tables in the medbay, which he had often seen repurposed for interrogation. 

No, there was nothing therapeutic about the prospect of that treatment. 

Jyn’s hands, though. He could stand her touch.

Right up until it was too much.

The relaxation that had stolen through him from nape to the end of his aching spine was making an escape, tension creeping back in its wake. He heard her sigh behind him, and stilled at the weight and gentle pressure of her forehead, leaning directly between his shoulder blades.

“Why do you make everything so difficult?” she murmured into his shirt, breath warming the fabric and skin beneath. 

It was so perfectly something he might say to her that it startled a huff of laughter from him. Her head tilted, the flat of her cheek pressing to him now, and he fought with himself, needing to pull away, to put space between them again, but wanting to stay. He was tired of fighting a two-prong offensive, trying to keep going in the war around them, while keeping his head in the war between them. Sometimes he had trouble remembering why he was fighting this personal war at all.

One of her hands had crept in along his side, fingers curled against his lower ribs. He ever so carefully placed his hand over it, fingers slotted between hers, and held it there, feeling warmth gather between their skin. 

“I don’t know what to do with you, Jyn.” He unthinkingly dragged their linked hands in, pulling her closer. 

She hesitated a heartbeat, before her body pressed warmly all along his back, head tucked down against his shoulder. “You seemed more certain on Scarif.” There was a soft well of silence before the planet’s name, an acknowledgement. She didn’t say any of the other things she might have said. Things she had probably said once or twice in the dark, to herself; or, angry with fear in a dimly-lit medbay, to him while he was unconscious. _You said I was home. You said all the way._

There was a long silence, while he let his thoughts gather, considering and discarding and overthinking his response. On a mission, in the field, with his informants, he was quick, agile, sometimes even glib. With her, he had to think. Rash words had gotten him into trouble before.

“It was easier then.” When he thought they were going to die. When they had a mission that was so much more important than their individual wants. Before Jyn Erso had been flung into his life, Cassian hadn’t felt the urge to indulge his own needs or desires. The cause, the fight, were enough. What use did a spy have for individual entanglements, anyway? An unacceptable risk. 

Her cheek moved against his back, nuzzling. It was an absurdly tender gesture, and his eyes slipped shut as he focused on it. If he pretended for a moment, like it was a mission, like this was a persona he could inhabit, he could believe that _this_ was easy. He had never expected, when they pulled her out of Wobani, that a woman who had spent so many years with killers and radicals and locked in a prison cell could want so much touch. Touch required trust, and he still sometimes didn’t understand how she had so much of that precious resource left to give. How she could bring herself to give any of it at all to him.

She slipped her other arm around his hips, shifting closer again, before settling back into stillness. This he could _almost_ stand. 

Her voice though, when she finally spoke, was soft, introspective. This conversation felt like the terminus of an arc that had begun after Eadu, maybe earlier, and her words had the weight of a decision.

“I never told you about the rest of my father’s message.”

A pause. He couldn’t tell if she was waiting for him to fill it. “No,” he agreed.

She was picking her words with care. It wasn’t something she bothered with, usually. “I’m glad sometimes that it was destroyed. I don’t know if I could have stood to have the Council pick it apart. It was very...personal.”

He focused on breathing, on inhabiting the moment, giving her time to speak. He had been tense and afraid and angry with her earlier, and he owed her this. ...He owed her a lot _more_ than this.

“I had spent most of my life pretending he was dead.” He knew. She’d thrown that out at him the first time they’d met, under Draven’s hawkish glower.

“But he--Papa never forgot. He made his mind a weapon turned against the Empire, and never, in all of those years, did he forget me or believe that I was lost. He said--” She paused, pressing her cheek against him harder. He leaned back a bit, just enough to respond to her need. It was easier when he didn’t think about it. “He said that he could only think of me when he was strong, because the pain of it might make him fail.”

Cassian could have cursed Galen Erso for giving his daughter that kind of ammunition. He knew what she was going to say next. There was only one way for that fulcrum to tilt, and she had placed it right against the widening crack between his heart and his principles. 

Her fingers curled beneath his hand, grasping his shirt. He braced himself, which was a pointless exercise. She rose on her knees, body sliding against his, and anchored her chin over his shoulder. He didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh or drive his fist into the nearest titanium plating, as she dragged out the inevitable final blow. 

Her lips brushed the shell of his ear, her breath soft, so soft. “Is that what you’re afraid of?”

He made a slightly dark, despairing sound low in his throat and twisted in her arms, ignoring the twinge in his spine. He should have fled when he had the chance. “You’re killing me, Jyn.”

Her eyes were wide open, waiting for him. “No,” she murmured matter-of-factly. “I’m trying to make you _live_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Smexy bits possibly to follow when I get home from work.
> 
> This concept got entirely away from me.


	3. it's not complicated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So don’t leave. It’s not complicated, Cassian.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of this snippet has been sitting in a notebook for awhile. I just like to write about these nerds being tactile.

Soft, slow breaths, timed in counterpoint to racing pulses. Cassian held himself still as Jyn leaned closer, her eyes watchful. Their breath mingled but she paused and held her position the barest of centimeters from him.

“What is it?”

That familiar wry smile. “I hadn't thought this far ahead. I didn't think you'd give in,” she admitted.

He closed his eyes for a moment, huffing a soft breath of a laugh. He leaned in, closing the remaining distance between them and resting his forehead against hers. Her face became an out of focus blur. 

“What do you want?”

He wondered what thoughts went through her mind, as she tilted her head just enough that her lips hovered micrometers from his own. _Everything I thought we'd never have time for, on Scarif. Everything that flashed before my eyes, in the turbolift. Everything--everything--everything..._

But all she said, simply, was: “You.”

She made it all seem so simple. It had only been simple on Scarif, when he'd been ready to die at her side, when he'd threaded his fingers with hers, pulled her in against his broken body one last time-- That had only been simple because it had a clear end, a terminus curving inward on a vanishing, radiant, blinding horizon. Months later, there was nothing simple about the fact he had survived, that he wanted her, that every time he felt himself growing too comfortable with the creeping intimacy of their casual touches he imagined losing her, imagined having to chose between her and the cause, imagined his finger on a trigger and an order with her name on it. If Scarif, if his entire past, hadn't been enough to shape his nightmares, the thought of having her and losing her would have been all it took to steal any iota of his peace of mind.

“You're overthinking aga--”

He angled his head, catching her impatient lips with his, lifting a hand that was steady and surer than he felt to cradle the curve of her jaw. His kisses were tender, exploratory, finding the corners of her impertinent lips, tongue-tip caressing those soft creases, but refusing her invitation when she parted for him with a muted sound of desire. He would do this properly.

He'd worry about his peace of mind later.

xxxx

The sound of the chrono chirping from the cockpit dragged Cassian out of a dozing lethargy. His back was twinging again from prolonged contact with cold deckplates, but the rest of him was warm. Jyn was curled on top of him, legs tangled with his, the animal warmth of their bodies secured between the crumpled tarp beneath them and the thermal blanket tucked around them.

She wasn’t asleep. He could see her eyes were open, fixed on her hand where it was pressed to his chest. He skated a hand up the curve of her back, feeling the smoothness of her skin. It was the least scarred part of her body, he now knew, which somehow didn’t surprise him. On paper, she read like a thief and a common criminal, but she wasn’t the sort to be wounded while running away. He had accused her once of having the luxury of choosing, but even then he hadn’t believed it.

Her chin was propped on the back of her other hand, just over his breastbone. She peered up at him from beneath the fringe of her hair. He wasn’t sure what was in her expression, but he thought maybe she was waiting for him to disappoint her.

“You need to get to the cockpit,” she said evenly, but made no move to let him up.

“In a minute,” he agreed, letting his hand make another slow, stroking pass from her nape to the dimples at the base of her spine. 

She kept studying him, and he let her, dropping his head back onto the arm he had crooked beneath it. His hand started another lazy circuit.

“Cassian.” He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear the quirk of a smile in her voice. “Are you _petting_ me?”

He stilled his hand for a moment, then continued, dragging the ball of his thumb up the groove of her spine, his fingertips trailing behind. “Yes.”

There was a long pause, then her lips pressed lightly to his chest, above his heart. “Alright.”

He really did need to bring them out of hyperspace. They would land on Hoth, then there would be debrief, the intel they had retrieved would go off for analysis, there would be new orders. It had never given him pause before. Not like this. This moment felt like it existed outside his reality.

He wasn’t sure he could transition back into intelligence mode and keep it intact, and that troubled him.

Jyn’s weight shifted restlessly and she levered herself up to kiss his jaw, lips tender against his scruff. “Stop overthinking. You’re making me nervous.” 

There was a thread of humor in her voice, but it hadn’t reached her eyes, grey tinged with green like a sky just after a storm, when he pushed himself up on his elbows to watch her pull away from him. She let the blanket fall from her shoulders, unselfconscious in her nudity as she hunted around for her clothes. He let himself watch her for a moment, as if he hadn’t had his fill of her already (he hadn’t).

She stood over him when she’d finished, looking a little bemused that he still hadn’t moved. Her lips quirked. “Do you need a hand?”

He considered that a moment. “I don’t want to leave.” _You._

It was the worst sort of non-sequitur, wrapped up so inextricably in the moment and their entire existence. She leaned down, offering him her hands to drag him to his feet. He took them, and thought for a strange moment about pulling her back down, about going to the cockpit and entering coordinates for anywhere that wasn’t Hoth.

He stood with a muffled groan, feeling the ache of Scarif low in his back and along the rest of his spine and backs of his legs. Her hands stayed tangled with his and she leaned up on her toes, kissing his throat. 

“So don’t leave. It’s not complicated, Cassian.” 

Her hands squeezed his and then she ducked back down to retrieve his shirt. His brows quirked when, instead of handing it to him, she pulled it over her head and headed for the cockpit. It fit her like a tunic, loose around her thighs. 

“Jyn--”

“Spoils of war, Captain,” she threw over her shoulder, voice unaccountably jaunty.

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth, and he retrieved the rest of his clothes quickly despite the hitch in his back.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pulling on Legends/EU material here. Spice/glitterstim is a popular and highly addictive drug in the Star Wars universe. It's what Han was hauling when he had to dump his cargo and got that infamous bounty on his head. Among other things, the spice imbues the user with a high that increases telepathic senses temporarily. 
> 
> ...Basically, Cassian Andor's worst nightmare. 
> 
> I might come back to this fic later to examine what happens after, but for the moment it felt done with that final line.


End file.
